Chemical analysis: iPhone 5, 4S are Apple’s greenest smartphones yet

Apple's iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S rank among the least "toxic" smartphones with significant market share, according to analysis by iFixit and HealthyStuff.org. The analysis also shows that Apple has made significant strides in reducing hazardous materials from each successive iPhone iteration as part of its promise to make "the most environmentally responsible products in our industry."

HealthyStuff.org laid waste to 36 smartphones, examining the individual chemical components of each part using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. Each device had its components measured for common toxic chemicals such as bromine, chlorine, mercury, and lead, and then rated by the amount of these chemicals on a scale of 0 to 5.

The original iPhone qualified as "high concern," rating a full 5.0. However, each successive iPhone model did appreciably better, with the iPhone 3G (and presumably 3GS) scoring 3.91, and the iPhone 4 scoring 2.95. The iPhone 4S ranked number two among all smartphones tested (and number one among Apple's) with a 2.69 "low concern" rating. The iPhone 5 fared slightly worse at 2.75, but still is considered "low concern."

Source: iFixit/HealthyStuff.org

"Nearly all the other phones that were marked 'low concern' are specifically marketed as green phones," according to iFixit. "Of the high market share phones analyzed, the iPhone 4 and 5 easily rank best, with fewer toxic chemicals both by component and by chemical."

iFixit also noted that overall, newer smartphones tended to contain less hazardous materials, but that most manufacturers were inconsistent even among currently shipping models.

"There is a trend of less toxics over time—especially for Apple," iFixit said. "That's good, but it's not good enough. Many toxics remain."

Promoted Comments

I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense. Am I really to believe that smartphones contain signficant quantities of toxic chlorine gas? That seems improbable. So, they contain chlorine-containing compounds? But, by that measure, my food is extremely toxic, containing signficant quantities of sodium chloride. Doesn't "toxicity" need a more sensible metric than "contains atoms of an element that is hazardous in its elemental form?"

The chlorine is normally contained as a compound in plastics as a part of the polymer (e.g., PVC), a flame retardant additive (less common these days) or as a trace contaminant (e.g., Cl residues in epoxy due to intermediate process chemistry).

The environmental hazards of concern are, in order of descending severity and probability:

- disposed plastics are often incinerated and unless the temperature is carefully regulated above a certain minimum, Br and Cl decompose to Dioxins and Furans which are deadly toxins. This is also a significant hazard to fire-fighters entering burning buildings to rescue consumers of electronic. As your local fire chief how much they enjoy the plastic fumes.

- heating discarded circuit boards to remove components and salvage metals is mainly done in poor countries under poorly regulated conditions and can also result in low temperature burning of plastics resulting in the release of Dioxins and Furans, poisoning the workers. But don't let it concern you, these are mainly poor folks in China, Africa and India, and it gives them a chance to enjoy playing with mobile phones and game consoles before the end of their short lives.

- plastics disposed in landfills can leach out chlorine and unreacted bromine, which then also decomposes to Dioxins poisoning water and aquatic life.

- the processes to synthesize and compound plastics using chlorine as a component also generates waste products, some of which find their way into the environment although this is generally better regulated that the above noted routes.

So eliminating the risk with replacement materials is a pretty good idea and the cost to consumer is a very small fraction of the price.

I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense. Am I really to believe that smartphones contain signficant quantities of toxic chlorine gas? That seems improbable. So, they contain chlorine-containing compounds? But, by that measure, my food is extremely toxic, containing signficant quantities of sodium chloride. Doesn't "toxicity" need a more sensible metric than "contains atoms of an element that is hazardous in its elemental form?"

I wish they would choose a scale that makes more sense. Their graphic shows 0-5, with 5 marked "High" and 0 marked "Low", but they omit the word "concern" and have no indication that their scale is backwards from common use (lower scores are better).

Newer version of a product has less harmful substances than prevision versions. I never would have thought that progress was made with each new version!

It would have been nice if Ars followed up their insignificant Apple story with an investigation into what is replacing these harmful substances, how does it effect operation/life of the electronics, and what more can be done to make the manufacturing of electronics less damaging on the environment. Instead we have yet another Ars love letter Apple story without any real investigative reporting.

Newer version of a product has less harmful substances than prevision versions. I never would have thought that progress was made with each new version!

It would have been nice if Ars followed up their insignificant Apple story with an investigation into what is replacing these harmful substances, how does it effect operation/life of the electronics, and what more can be done to make the manufacturing of electronics less damaging on the environment. Instead we have yet another Ars love letter Apple story without any real investigative reporting.

Disappointingly, the ifixit article actually has much more in-depth information.

Newer version of a product has less harmful substances than prevision versions. I never would have thought that progress was made with each new version!

It would have been nice if Ars followed up their insignificant Apple story with an investigation into what is replacing these harmful substances, how does it effect operation/life of the electronics, and what more can be done to make the manufacturing of electronics less damaging on the environment. Instead we have yet another Ars love letter Apple story without any real investigative reporting.

I agree with the sentiment in many of the previous posts regarding context for the results.

Comparing the results to other phones/electronics on the market, and providing calibration information such as the levels found in nature and the levels deemed hazardous, is necessary to determine if this is meaningful progress.

It's a journal post in the Apple section of Ars, it's specifically marked as such at the top. Seriously, you are complaining that it's reporting on the results of someone else's work, without trying to steal it, and that it's positive about apple? Christ.

Newer version of a product has less harmful substances than prevision versions. I never would have thought that progress was made with each new version!

It would have been nice if Ars followed up their insignificant Apple story with an investigation into what is replacing these harmful substances, how does it effect operation/life of the electronics, and what more can be done to make the manufacturing of electronics less damaging on the environment. Instead we have yet another Ars love letter Apple story without any real investigative reporting.

Disappointingly, the ifixit article actually has much more in-depth information.

Newer version of a product has less harmful substances than prevision versions. I never would have thought that progress was made with each new version!

It would have been nice if Ars followed up their insignificant Apple story with an investigation into what is replacing these harmful substances, how does it effect operation/life of the electronics, and what more can be done to make the manufacturing of electronics less damaging on the environment. Instead we have yet another Ars love letter Apple story without any real investigative reporting.

Disappointingly, the ifixit article actually has much more in-depth information.

You may be surprised, but I did read the ifixit article before posting. While that article had more information than the Ars story did, I wanted more information about these hazardous substances in electronics than either article provided. I guess my expectations of Ars digging into more of the details of these improvements into smart phones, and what it means for the electronics, life/operations and what else can be done, was too high for this regurgitation of another site's article just to grab Apple clicks.

It's a journal post in the Apple section of Ars, it's specifically marked as such at the top. Seriously, you are complaining that it's reporting on the results of someone else's work, without trying to steal it, and that it's positive about apple? Christ.

You're right, I guess. I'm still getting used to this new layout.

Quote:

Wait, you're disappointed that we linked to more information?

No, disappointed at the angle taken. Why can't it be about the reports and the science and not specifically about iPhone, Apple, iPhone?

Can there be some sort of contrast with other popular phones in the article at where the list of iPhones are, one could add a few others like the Cirtus and the Galaxy S III. Needs some contrast anyways instead of just iPhones.

Can there be some sort of contrast with other popular phones in the article at where the list of iPhones are, one could add a few others like the Cirtus and the Galaxy S III. Needs some contrast anyways instead of just iPhones.

You can't compare Android and Apple phones in the same article anymore. It would just be another thread with chest thumping and feces being thrown widly with no regard or thought.

Not when you factor in all the extra chargers and extra dongles that Lightning requires...So much for a standard of micro usb.When you add up buying additional chargers, one for car, one extra, that is about $60.It never ends with the Apple money machine.Maybe some day they will pay dividends on their stock before they crash like RIM.And don't say it can't happen.

I like the ideas behind these reports, but they never realize the distinction between being "green" and "safe/not-containing-high-amounts-of-hazardous-materials"

Smart phones are inherently not "Green"; tin and rare earth metal mining are the main reasons.

I think the green argument is that there will be less chemical leaching when disposed of or recycled. You're right though, smartphones will not be trully green for sometime if ever. I don't think the article labeled them "Green" just "Greener" than whatever else is out there.

This doesn't actually mean that the iPhone 4S/5 are the greenest smartphones of all of the ones that exist. It just says "out of all of the previous iPhones", which should be no surprise really. Certainly they are not the greenest smartphones overall either. The tacked on "with signification market share" sees to that.

This doesn't actually mean that the iPhone 4S/5 are the greenest smartphones of all of the ones that exist. It just says "out of all of the previous iPhones", which should be no surprise really. Certainly they are not the greenest smartphones overall either. The tacked on "with signification market share" sees to that.

Based on this one factor alone, the iPhone 5 isn't the greenest smartphone out there. But iFixit also rated it very high on repairability, it contains less materials overall, and has a higher percentage of recyclable materials than previous iPhones. This suggests the iPhone 5 could be one of the greenest smartphone available. I agree that the realities of electronics manufacturing isn't exactly "green" to begin with, but I applaud any and all efforts to make such devices using less toxic materials, be more efficient in production, and be easier to recycle. Apple has been working on all three of these in all its devices for over 5 years.

I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense. Am I really to believe that smartphones contain signficant quantities of toxic chlorine gas? That seems improbable. So, they contain chlorine-containing compounds? But, by that measure, my food is extremely toxic, containing signficant quantities of sodium chloride. Doesn't "toxicity" need a more sensible metric than "contains atoms of an element that is hazardous in its elemental form?"

This. This is why these sorts of tests need to be done by some sort of body that actually understands both the science and the manufacturing process. Running a spectrometer over an object and detecting toxins would reveal that literally everything we touch - *even in nature* - is toxic. But of course it isn't, because the sodium chloride, as in your example, isn't toxic in the state found in most foods.

I mean, sure, it's nice to see there's less of them overall in a new iPhone. That's positive in and of itself. But the idea that it should reach 0 to be "non-toxic" is a fallacy, and both improbable *and* a straw-man.

Actually, XRF is not very precise or reliable technology for elemental analysis and is only used by manufacturers to spot-check incoming materials or components for compliance to specifications, and if they fail, then they would use more precise digestion/spectrographic techniques.

And a tell-tale sign is the persistently high chlorine readings in all of these phones and parts.

FYI, the ANSI/IEC, JPCA and JIG standards used for halogen-free materials contain the following limits:

Total Bromine and Chlorine combined: 1500ppmBromine or Chlorine individually: 900ppm

So by that standard, virtually all of these tests indicate failure.

Personally I doubt that is actually the case, it should be a result of improper calibration of the XRF for Chlorine and the basically poor accuracy.

You should discuss this with iFixit and get their response, we don't need more poorly execute junk testing.

EDIT TO ADD CONTENT:

I went to the linked site to review the report directly and it confirms what I state above about the poor detection capability for XRF for Chlorine. In the section on Methodology ...

Given the standard for Chlorine as an individual element in "Halogen Free Materials is 900ppm, far below the detection capability of the equipment, I'd suggest this data is not really useful to rank the products on Chlorine content.

I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense. Am I really to believe that smartphones contain signficant quantities of toxic chlorine gas? That seems improbable. So, they contain chlorine-containing compounds? But, by that measure, my food is extremely toxic, containing signficant quantities of sodium chloride. Doesn't "toxicity" need a more sensible metric than "contains atoms of an element that is hazardous in its elemental form?"

The chlorine is normally contained as a compound in plastics as a part of the polymer (e.g., PVC), a flame retardant additive (less common these days) or as a trace contaminant (e.g., Cl residues in epoxy due to intermediate process chemistry).

The environmental hazards of concern are, in order of descending severity and probability:

- disposed plastics are often incinerated and unless the temperature is carefully regulated above a certain minimum, Br and Cl decompose to Dioxins and Furans which are deadly toxins. This is also a significant hazard to fire-fighters entering burning buildings to rescue consumers of electronic. As your local fire chief how much they enjoy the plastic fumes.

- heating discarded circuit boards to remove components and salvage metals is mainly done in poor countries under poorly regulated conditions and can also result in low temperature burning of plastics resulting in the release of Dioxins and Furans, poisoning the workers. But don't let it concern you, these are mainly poor folks in China, Africa and India, and it gives them a chance to enjoy playing with mobile phones and game consoles before the end of their short lives.

- plastics disposed in landfills can leach out chlorine and unreacted bromine, which then also decomposes to Dioxins poisoning water and aquatic life.

- the processes to synthesize and compound plastics using chlorine as a component also generates waste products, some of which find their way into the environment although this is generally better regulated that the above noted routes.

So eliminating the risk with replacement materials is a pretty good idea and the cost to consumer is a very small fraction of the price.